Billionaire Sir James Dyson is the man who turned household objects like vacuum cleaners , wheelbarrows, and fans into bona fide works of engineering art, with famous products like the Dyson Airblade. He talks about the power of great technological design and how to find a fortune somewhere at the intersection between trial and error.

James Dyson: So you start off building prototypes of something, part of that system, that might solve the problem. And of course it doesn’t. And you work for days, years, and even decades trying to get something that does work, and the final solution is most unexpected. But that’s what my life is and my life is a life of failure.

I love things that you use every day and making them work better. Most of them don’t work very well.

Marc Fennell: Now, vacuums without bags, a wheelbarrow that doesn’t get stuck in the mud, fans without blades—at least from an outsider’s perspective it seems like you have this amazing knack of taking very, what would seem like very ordinary everyday products and making them a little bit magic.

Where does that interest start for you, in taking domestic products and finding ways of reinventing them? Where did that begin?

James Dyson: Well, it starts with frustration as a user. You know, as a kid I was made to vacuum and I remember this screaming noise and the smell of stale dust and the inefficiency of the thing—having to go outside and shake that terrible bag out. And, you know, having to bend down and pick things up that it wasn’t picking up.

So it’s frustration and wondering if something couldn’t be better. There must be a better way of doing it. And as an engineer, you look at almost everything and say, ‘Actually, that would be better if…’ and, ‘That doesn’t work very well. I must try and think of something better.’ And it gets lodged in the back of your mind and suddenly somewhere you see a solution to the problem.

Like, for the vacuum cleaner I was in a sawmill and saw these massive 30-foot-high cyclones collecting sawdust all day long without clogging. And I though, ‘Ah, I wonder if those work on a very small scale.’ So I rushed home and made a quick prototype to see if it worked.

So it’s going around with that frame of mind really that leads you to where you get to.

Marc Fennell: I love how you said you just went home and you whipped up a quick prototype, because in actual fact you went home and you whipped up 5127 prototypes…

James Dyson: Well, I didn’t know that at the beginning… fortunately. I thought I’d get there quite easily. In fact, it took me five years and 5000 prototypes and it was frustrating. And actually, my life is a life of failure. So, it was 5127—so there were 5126 failures until I got the last one that worked.

But during that journey you learn so much, because you learn from failure and you go and study it every day and you… ‘Why doesn’t that fail?’ and you can’t find the solution, you can’t think of a solution. I mean, there are cleverer people who can, but my view is you can’t, because I’ve got lots of scientists and engineers and they can’t immediately know the answer.

So you start off building prototypes of something, a part of that system that might solve the problem. And of course it doesn’t, and you work for days, years, and even decades trying to get something that does work. And the final solution is most unexpected.

But that’s what my life is and it’s a disease; I mean, it’s something you have to do.

Marc Fennell: If you had known that it would take 5000 prototypes, would you have still done it?

James Dyson: Well, certainly I wouldn’t have. And the bank manager certainly wouldn’t have backed me.

Marc Fennell: I don’t think your wife would have backed you either!

James Dyson: It wasn’t me who had the stamina, it was the bank manager also had the stamina.

Marc Fennell: It’s interesting you talk about failure. I’m curious, for you, what’s the best mistake you’ve ever made in your career?

James Dyson: Ah, well I’ve made so many, it’s very difficult to pick out the best one. Probably the one that was most formative was going around showing my technology to people who are now my competitors and failing to sell it to them. And the best thing about that was… Of course it’s very depressing to begin with: ‘Why aren’t these big companies doing it? Why don’t they want a new bit of technology?’ And suddenly I realised they actually didn’t want a new bit of technology. So my failure told me that if I produced a new bit of technology, I would be very different and maybe people would buy mine, rather than their old technology.

So that’s an example of failing, but understanding why you’re failing and realising the opportunity in being a failure.

Marc Fennell: I’m curious it’s still about your choice of products, because again we’re talking about things that people have in their homes; we’re talking about vacuum cleaners—and the wheelbarrow’s actually my favourite one; you know, the idea of replacing a wheel with a ball. So simple. But why home products? Why things that are… why not invent space travel?

James Dyson: Because I use them myself. I love things that you use every day and making them work better. And most of them don’t work very well.

With wheelbarrows, hand dryers, vacuum cleaners, fans, heaters, I’m a user and I know what I don’t like. And if I’m going to do something completely different that does something in a different way—you know, it doesn’t have a blade—I can make a judgment about the risk I’m taking and whether or not I would buy that thing. And would I like using it? Would it work well for me? So I’m much more comfortable doing that type of thing than doing something esoteric like going to space.

Marc Fennell: What’s the piece of design in the world that irritates you most?

James Dyson: I’ll tell you what it is, and I get it almost every day, is when you put a DVD into the DVD player and you go through those endless warnings and then you suddenly realise—and endless trailers—and when it comes to your film, you press a button, you suddenly realise you didn’t press the subtitle button, if it was a foreign film. So you have to take the DVD out, put it back in, and start all over again. And I think they really overdo it on those FBI warnings. So those annoy me.

Marc Fennell: Which is surprising, though, because Dyson protect their intellectual property quite intensely. Do you believe that all intellectual property should be defended absolutely in the courts?

James Dyson: Very much so, but we don’t ram it down anyone’s throat like that and force them to sit in front of a television and read it all…

Marc Fennell: There’s no warning before you buy…

James Dyson: There ought to be a warning to stop people copying it, other manufacturers copying it, but as far as our customers are concerned, we want them to use the product with enjoyment and not to have to read anything. But, no, the courts should uphold intellectual property, and intellectual property should be stronger, and courts should be much tougher about punishing people who do that.

Marc Fennell: But we’re also at a point now where we have companies like Apple and Google constantly in patent lawsuits, chewing up a lot of resources that I guess from an outsider’s point of view could go back into innovating. Do you think there’s a point at which those kinds of lawsuits become counterproductive?

James Dyson: I very much disapprove of what are called patent trolling, where companies buy up patents to use them as offensive weapons or defensive weapons. Because what happens in a patent lawsuit, if you’re suing someone for copying something, they then throw in a whole lot of patents that they’ve bought and pretend that you’ve copied those.

And that’s why these cases get so expensive. And particularly in the United States patent cases cost millions and millions of dollars—you know, $10 or $20 million for a single case.

So that whole side of it I heartily disapprove of and, as you quite rightly pointed out, it’s a waste of time and money. So I’d like patent cases to be much shorter. It’s usually perfectly obvious who’s copied who—it’s perfectly obvious that Samsung have copied Apple—and why can’t it be a very short case with a very simple… instead of going to lots and lots of experts, just take a view, a quick view about whether a patent—or a visual design, in the case of the Apple one, Apple-Samsung one—have been copied.

Marc Fennell: There’s a quote I found earlier where you said the future of Britain shouldn’t be something like the web, it should be manufacturing. And that I think is an idea that is at odds with, I think, what a lot of people think about what the future of Britain’s industry should be. Why do you feel that way?

James Dyson: Well, it’s very fashionable now, and the government’s given, you know, $750 million to this Silicon Roundabout, their version of a Silicon Valley, for people to do computer games and try to create new forms of Facebook. Now, my view of that is that’s all very interesting and it’s a bit like publishing in the old days, the huge explosion in publishing during the twentieth century.

And it’s fine as a service to manufacturing and the way we lead our lives. But manufacturing is where the real growth is and even during the dotcom boom, manufacturing’s going at a far greater rate than the likes of Facebook and Google. So, and it’s important we remember that. And in order to create wealth you’ve got to create products and export products. I’m afraid, you know, there is some money in computer games, but Caterpillar is a giant compared with Facebook. I mean, it employs 620,000 people and Facebook employs 2400 people.

And what gives far greater exports? What creates far more wealth? And of course it’s Caterpillar, and Rolls Royce aero engines, not what goes on on the web. So I’m not decrying what goes on on the web, I’m merely saying that don’t ignore the far greater creator of wealth and people who really create things and make things. So everybody involved in this is being creative. It’s a proper industry.

Marc Fennell: And yet Dyson a few years ago moved their manufacturing out of the UK to Malaysia, so what is it that Malaysia’s doing right that the UK was doing wrong?

James Dyson: Well, the UK’s not doing anything wrong, the problem is that electronic components have historically been made in low-cost countries and in the Far East, where they’re interested in that sort of thing. Britain and a lot of western countries lost their interest in manufacturing things and entrepreneurs didn’t want to make things, they wanted to go into service industries. So we have to buy our components where they’re made and where they’re made well, and that’s in the Far East.

Now, we got to a point where we were importing all our components from the Far East and then exporting our products. So—and as it happens, we weren’t allowed to expand our factory in England; the local planning people refused it. So we decided to move our assembly into Malaysia and Singapore, which is a very low value-added, by the way. I mean, we control the factories. It’s not outsourced; they’re our factories and we control them there.

But very little money stays in Malaysia. It all goes back to England and we export from England to the rest of the world. So all the tax is paid in England; there’s a huge amount of employment in England created by our company, and a huge amount of VAT, our tax, local tax, paid. So we’re a British company, exporting from Britain, we just happen not to do our assembly in Britain.

Marc Fennell: Again coming back to this idea of reinventing the home and reinventing the domestic space with these kinds of products, there’s been a lot of talk in the last year or so—last four or five years or so—about smart houses, houses that are completely integrated with the internet and can be controlled remotely. Is that an area that you see Dyson potentially moving into?

James Dyson: Oh yeah. We’ve got to be in there and we already are. All our products have very sophisticated software in them and artificial intelligence. So to be able to download updates on that intelligence, and improvements, is vital. So we’re using the Wi-Fi system to do that seamlessly, so you don’t have that awful business of, ‘Do you want this? Do you agree to the new terms?’ Press a button, and your computer’s down for an hour.

Marc Fennell: You hate warnings, don’t you? I’m getting this…

James Dyson: It should just seamlessly do it. So I think that Wi-Fi in every home and making Wi-Fi better and improving the broadband, or whatever the new name for it is, all those sort of things are really important.